This application claims priority of European Patent Application No. 99460045.0, which was filed on Jun. 28, 1999 and European Patent Application No. 00304248.8, which was filed on May 19, 2000.
The present invention relates to a multimedia processing system architecture.
The appearance of multimedia communication has brought with it a number of systems capable of processing signals that vary from voice to text to images. These systems are, for example, voice mail systems, unified message systems, or interactive voice response systems. The invention will mainly be described using the example of a unified message system, given as a non-limiting example of an application of the invention.
Unified message systems are systems that record various types of messages, such as telephone, electronic, or fax messages, and that provide the recipient with the message either in its original form (voice, internet text, fax text, etc.) or in a different form. The services or multimedia tasks that such systems provide are very varied and, as an example, may include any of the following tasks:
1) recording telephone messages;
2) reviewing telephone messages;
3) reviewing electronic messages.
Running these multimedia tasks requires means for connecting to the telephone network and to the Internet in order to receive messages, more specific multimedia processing means to transform the messages, and communication buses to create contacts between these various means.
For example, in telephone message recording, the service requires means for connecting to the telephone network, and a recording device that compresses and saves the message in a storage unit of the system. The telephone message reviewing service requires means for connecting to the telephone network, and possibly a voice recognition device that enables the subscriber to communicate with the system in order to select the message the subscriber wants to hear. The system may require a DTMF detection device to detect the buttons that have been pressed by the user to select the message. The system may also require a reading device that reads the file for the selected message in the storage unit, decompresses the message, and creates a flow of multimedia data from the file to reproduce the telephone message. The electronic message reviewing service requires a voice synthesis device to transform the electronic messages into a voice, in addition to the means necessary for reviewing telephone messages.
At present, multimedia processing systems are constructed around a PCI, Compact PCI, VME, or similar standard bus. The systems include a specific TDM (time-division multiplexing) bus to carry multimedia data. This specific bus is optimized for carrying the voice at a throughput of 64 kbps.
The TDM transport is not suitable for multimedia applications, given the diversity of multimedia sequences to be carried, such as audio, video, etc., and the diversity of the data encoding formats of these sequences, there being a number of audio, video, or text encoding formats.
The invention provides a system architecture that is not limited to a single mode of transport and manages multimedia data transfers across a plurality of different buses and communication protocols, such as ATM, TDM, TCP, UDP, etc. As a result, the invention provides an upgradeable multimedia processing system that is capable of operating with many types of communication buses and that provides simple management of multimedia processing means and multimedia flows.
The invention relates to a multimedia processing system architecture intended to perform a plurality of multimedia tasks on multimedia data, comprising:
a plurality of multimedia processing blocks to run all or part of the operations required to perform a multimedia task,
at least one communication bus to carry the multimedia data flows between said multimedia processing blocks,
an application interface to manage said multimedia processing blocks, with said application interface being in charge of creating, for each multimedia task, a subset of multimedia processing blocks to be assembled to run said multimedia task,
characterized in that each multimedia processing block contains at least one input interface to connect in receive mode to said at least one communication bus and/or at least one output interface to connect in send mode to at least one communication bus, with at least one of the input interfaces and one of the output interfaces comprising several ports to be connected to respective communication buses,
and in that, to create a subset of multimedia processing blocks, the application interface selects multimedia processing blocks to form said set, and then examines the input and output interfaces of said multimedia processing blocks selected in order to check whether all the multimedia data exchanges required to perform the task are possible within said subset and determine, for these exchanges, the encoding format of the multimedia data to be exchanged and the communication buses to be used to connect the different multimedia processing blocks of said subset in pairs according to the complementarity of the ports of their respective input and output interface.
In the event of exchange being impossible after the input and output interfaces of the selected subset have been examined, the application interface modifies the selection of the multimedia processing blocks.
This type of architecture enables an identical application interface to be used irrespective of the number or the type of communication buses used in the system.
Other advantages and characteristics of the invention will become clear in the following detailed description.